Perlmeter, Irving Papers

Assistant Press Secretary to the President, 1950-1953

The papers of Irving Perlmeter include correspondence, printed materials, and other items concerning his association with President Harry S. Truman and his career as a government official.

Size: Less than one linear foot (approximately 400 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: The donor has given their copyright in these papers to the United States of America. Documents created by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are in the public domain. The copyright interest in other documents in the collection presumably belongs to the creators of those documents or their heirs.
Processed by: Randy Sowell (2024).

Irving Perlmeter was born in Omaha, Nebraska on February 8, 1909. He attended Creighton University and the University of Nebraska. Perlmeter became a reporter for the Associated Press (AP) in Lincoln, Nebraska, and was transferred to the AP’s Washington, D.C. office in 1936. By 1946, he was working for the Bureau of Internal Revenue as head of the Public Relations Division. In December 1950, Perlmeter became Assistant Press Secretary to the President and served in that position until the end of the Truman administration in January 1953. He then returned to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (which was renamed the Internal Revenue Service in 1953) and worked there until his retirement in 1976. Perlmeter died in Washington, D.C. on February 23, 1980.

The papers of Irving Perlmeter include correspondence, printed materials, and other items concerning his association with President Harry S. Truman and his career as a government official. The collection contains little information about Perlmeter’s work as Assistant Press Secretary to the President from 1950 to 1953. The correspondence includes letters exchanged between Truman and Perlmeter, most of which are personal in nature, and letters from the staff of the Harry S. Truman Library regarding Perlmeter’s papers. The printed materials include a history of the White House dating from the early 1950s, as well as a 1961 booklet on income taxes and programs for annual conferences of the Tax Executives Institute, which relate to Perlmeter’s career with the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Other items in the collection include press releases, tickets to the 1936 and 1952 Democratic National Conventions, an article on the use of television by Presidents, and an IRS briefing book for the Secretary of the Treasury dating from 1974. The collection contains some items that were collected by Perlmeter’s family following his death in 1980.

A transcript of the Truman Library’s oral history interview with Irving Perlmeter is available online.